Ocean Film Festival to introduce Michigan ice surfer to Edinburgh

Michigan surfer Dan Schetter looking for waves a still from Surfer Dan

The Ocean Film Festival World Tour washes into Edinburgh later this month, offering a tasting menu of short films concerning the life aquatic. Highlights include Manry at Sea, a documentary about US newspaperman Robert Manry’s bold 1965 attempt to cross the Atlantic in a tiny, 13-and-a-half foot sailing boat called Tinkerbelle; I Am Fragile, in which filmmaker Florian Ledoux trains his lens on the landscape and wildlife of north-eastern Canada and western Greenland; and A Peace Within, which follows “extreme artist” Philip Gray as he attempts to execute an underwater painting in subterranean pools in Mexico – pools, incidentally, which some locals still believe are gateways to the afterlife.

As is often the case with this event, there’s also a film about surfing on the bill, but this one is by no means your average surf flick. There are no palm trees, no Hawaiian shirts, no ukuleles and no dreamy tropical sunsets. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s no sun full-stop. What Tim Kemple’s film Surfer Dan has in abundance, however, is grey skies, snow-covered beaches and bleak industrial landscapes. Oh, and icebergs – hundreds and hundreds of icebergs.

Set in Michigan on the shores of Lake Superior (which, fact fans, at 31,800 square miles, is larger than the entire state of Maine) the film follows hard-as-nails surfer Dan Schetter as he drives his clapped out van up and down the frigid lakeside in search of the perfect wave. OK, perhaps not the perfect wave, but any wave that looks even borderline surfable.